Only being able to get a refund if you haven't installed the game and owned it for no more than two weeks is wild. 50 dollars down the drain.

Today my friend and I tried to play Sea of Thieves for the first time. The game makes you to jump through the hoops to create Microsoft account which my friend declined to do. I can understand, nobody wants that endless accounts and nobody likes additional chores instead of playing game. So, both of us decided to return the game.

This was the first time I learned about playstation return policy, which is pretty much "no returns". You only can get money back if you haven't downloaded game yet. But how do I know if game does not work before I start it? It is not like they make you sign all that agreements before buying game, they want you money, but after the purchase made Playstation does not care about your experience any more.

If game demands you to sell your kidney it is totally fine. Sony already got their money and does not care. Seriously, I have my account for over ten year, spent thousands of dollars on games and I cannot get my $20 back for a product which I do not like?

There's been a lot of very well deserved criticism of Sony's awful refund policy and how hard it is to actually contact support to get a refund for non-downloaded games, as well as the hundreds of scam titles that have plagued the store, all trying to mislead customers into giving them money. I've not seen many people really highlighting how both of these things go hand-in-hand though and how Sony's lack of any modern refund policy is actually making the PS Store a worse experience to shop at, due to the increasingly high risk of being misled and losing your money.

After the recent Top Downloads blog, I saw that the game Flight Simulator Delivery 2025 VR was at the top of the charts in EU (and #4 in the US). The game is by 404 Games (a known scam publisher) and makes the game sound like Microsoft Flight Simulator from the store page. It just makes me think of all the people who bought that game, thinking it was Microsoft Flight Simulator on PS5/PS VR2, only to then realise it's a crappy shovelware game that they can no longer get their money back from, because they already downloaded it.

Yeah, shovelware/scam games are nothing new to digital storefronts, as Steam also has many, but the big difference is that Steam (and basically every other storefront like Epic, GOG, Ubisoft, EA, Xbox, with the exception of just Sony and Nintendo) let you actually test the game, then refund if it's not what you expected. The fact that you can be scammed out of $10-20 on the PS Store, because you bought a game thinking it was something else, based on what the PS Store shows you, is a huge reason not to browse the PS Store.

It's 2025 and digital purchases are the majority of the market, so we need the same consumer protections as we do for physical games, where you can just return it to the store if it's not to your liking, or just completely misleading.

If we could refund these scam games, then the number of them on the store wouldn't even be an issue, as you can just refund anything that you've been misled by.

I'm not even really sure how we can solve this and force Sony into offering a much better refund policy, as it seems like it's only really mentioned on Reddit, which is a tiny portion of the PS community. My only hope is that the lawsuit against Sony/PlayStation in the UK and the Netherlands somehow helps, but who knows at this point? But maybe if more news outlets start highlighting how terrible the PS Store is in this area, then Sony will have to respond.

The PlayStation Store has a problem of not allowing easy refunds within 2 hours of play like the other VR platforms and as a result has had some low-effort low-quality games sell well regardless of all the 1/5 star user review ratings they accumulate and I suspect all these games coming from CGI LAB SRL is the consequence.

Each of these is not releasing on any other platform where people can get refunds more easily.

I think if people buy low-effort low-quality games, they will feel burned by the platform and then avoid other much better games.

I know its been said before with no change but maybe it helps to say it again that PlayStation Store needs to adopt better refund policy & procedures to better serve its consumers.

PlayStation your refund policy is buns if you download a game you can’t even request a refund that is so cheeks I also believe that if you’ve only played like 15 mins max you should still be eligible for a refund but no you guys are greedy to hold onto peoples money which is ridiculous

I bought the Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life port for $8 yesterday and played it for around 30 minutes. It was super buggy and just not enjoyable to play because of some game breaking issues. I called to get a refund on the game, but was told “because I downloaded the game, I’m not allowed a refund.” I’ve never returned something on PS before but have on steam and other platforms and all of them have a time limit or play limit for returns. Is Sony’s seriously that, if you download the game, even if you only play it for 5 minutes and realize it’s not what you expected, there’s no refund?

I'm just gonna say it cuz it's true. Every other platform allows you to download a paid product, usually has a 2 hour time-frame for you to try the game, see if it's broken or has issues until you are locked out of a refund.. that's fair and reasonable and seems to work well because it's also usually supported by automated systems.

Not Sony.. Hell no.

Sony is supposed to uphold a marketplace for consumers where publishers and their "finished and playable" products make it there to be bought by consumers.. If you buy a game, download it and it's a broken mess that keeps crashing or corrupting your saves, hell i've had Black Ops games hard crash my system corrupting my entire system software forcing me to redownload the system software onto a USB stick and formatting my entire drive losing everything.. but guess what? they will still deny you a refund, why? because their policy states that the moment you download the product or have any kind of game progression, your refund is ineligible. yeah..

The most asinine part of this policy is that you have to put blind faith in Sony and the publisher that their product is not broken (which is hardly the case with most games today unfortunately), but in order to even determine if a game is broken to begin with, you'd have to download the game and play it to start experiencing the above..

Their policy is literally a scam.. they know a product is broken or they simply don't screen the products they host on their marketplace, they take consumers money, and deny them a refund after they download to find out the product is faulty then get refused their money back. idk about you guys.. but that's a god damn scam.

I talked to a Sony rep about this on the phone earlier, and they literally are just robots, they don't have any human emotion or sensibility in their responses, they literally just read from transcripts based upon these policies, but that's not really a gripe because they're just people doing their jobs and making a living with what they can.. so i get it, but still.. Sony is clearly anti-consumer, all they care about is your money and greed, they don't give a shit if you never buy from them again and move to Xbox or Steam or whatever platform else, Sony is just content with their ways and don't care to change while everyone else is evolving to be better.

I've supported Sony for so many years.. but enough is enough, I can't continue to support such an anti-consumer company anymore that borderline scam's their customers and doesn't blink twice about it either.

Long story short is my friend convinced me to buy 7 Days to Die, and I was already hesitant seeing how it looked for the price they are asking. I begrudgingly went through with it and spent maybe 15-20 minutes in the game (most of which was spent just waiting on loading screens) before realizing it was not the quality I expected at all. Immediately closed the game and uninstalled before sitting for 30 minutes with PS chat until I got somebody, only to be told that because it was simply downloaded and opened at all that I can’t get a refund? I requested the refund within an hour of purchasing the damn thing, and now I have a $50 game I will never play. I have never had this problem on any other platform on the rare occasions that a refund was needed, so I am a bit appalled at this brain dead system. Who doesn’t grant a return even if it was simply downloaded!? Even Steam lets you issue a return if it’s under 2 hours of playtime, so I don’t get why PlayStation are so moronic in their policy like this.

I bought a game on the store for $40 and it’s hot garbage, I want my money back. But it says that if it’s been downloaded then refunds aren’t possible. In what world does that make sense? Has anyone been able to get around it by just pestering customer service?

It’s not a secret to anyone who’s tried to actively get a refund on a game they didn’t like because it wasn’t what was expected (IE Fallout 76 or No Mans Sky) or even people who have purchased poorly ported games (Like Marvels Ultimate Alliance 1+2) that Sony will fight you tooth and nail to refuse that refund.

As someone who’s been all digital since PS3 it baffles me how Sony gets away with such poor business practices towards their consumers on digital purchases. Simply DOWNLOADING a game voids your ability to get a refund on almost 100% of the cases.

I ask how you know a games going to constantly blue screen or not run properly or have game breaking bugs without personally playing it first?

Maybe if enough people voice their disdain for the current refund “policies” Sony has in place now they’ll actually listen and try to be more reasonable and at least allow a refund for any game that’s functionally unplayable to the user.

I STILL can’t get a refund for Marvels Ultimate Alliance 1+2 for PS4 even after they were removed from the ps store for being such poor ports with constant blue screens in multiplayer and that’s a real slap to the face for consumers who trust PS to have games in working condition on their stores and that their purchases won’t be regretted because of technical issues at no fault of their own.

Hi guys,

I recently bought a game on the PS store called “Rust - Console Edition”. I used to play this in the past on PC so I didn’t bother to look up reviews and the state of the game. But now I’ve been playing it for a week and its literally unplayable, it has a enormous amount of bugs and lagspikes despite having a excellent connection to the servers (15-20ms). Apparently these things are known for over 2 years now and it still hasn’t been fixed by the developer, so therefore I’ve submitted a refund request. I’ve sent Sony some clips as proof but it still got denied…

I really don’t know what to do, 60buck for a game that doesn’t even work is such a bummer.

I purchased AEW: Fight Forver because it was on my wishlist for a long time I thought I’d buy it, I bought it and played it, and didn’t like it, and apparently I’m not a eligible for a refund. That’s bullshit how are you supposed to know if you won’t like a game if you can’t refund it

I just bought the new Silent Hill 2 remake and discovered as soon as I started the game that you can not do anything with the motion blur and in the 4 minutes I had the game going, I started to immediately get sick. So I went to Playstation support for a refund and regardless of any issues other than pure game breaking issues, if you open the game once it registers as played so they just flat out refuse to refund after that. So now I’m stuck hoping the devs come through with motion blur controls, because otherwise I’ve just wasted 70 bucks.

Does anyone else find the PSN policy a little unreasonable?

I was recently trying to play Helldiver's 2 on my PS5 and found out the hard way that even if you link your PSN account to the game it doesn't carry over game data. I decided it wasn't worth it and figured I'd just refund it as I had only opened the game for maybe 10 minutes at most. To my surprise I found out that even if you just download the game from the PlayStation store it is no longer refundable.

Has anyone else experienced issues with this? I mean I definitely should've done some research before buying but most online stores give you at least a few hours of gameplay before your refund is void. How am I supposed to know if I even like the game if I can't try it?

Not trying to start a hate train or anything. Just genuinely curious what the community's thoughts.

Hi Reddit,

In February I bought 2 copies of Hogwarts Legacy, and Playstation will not give me a refund. The first copy I bought isn't compatible with my current console(I have a PS4 and I bought the PS5 version accidently). So after realizing my mistake, I also bought a copy of the PS4 version. My plan was to get a refund on the PS5 copy, and keep the PS4 copy. Well it has been over a month now. And I've been trying almost every single day to get a refund to no avail.

Before I share the issue I'm having, I feel like I should explain how the refund process is supposed to work. So, you go to Playstation's website and you click a few links that'll take you to their Customer Support. From there, a chat box loads and you put in your name and answer a few automated questions, and then it puts you on hold for an agent. After that, I assume the agent hears your story and gives you a refund.

However, I don't know if that's the case because I never get to that last part. Everytime I try to contact Playstation's support center and I get to the automated Chatbot it either stops loading the questions, making me have to end the chat prematurely, or it puts me in a queue and the agent never connects to the chat.

It's been really frustrating to have to deal with this. At first I chalked it up to issues with me (like my internet connect, etc. etc.) But as time goes on, it seem more and more likely that their Customer Support doesn't work by design! And there's no other way to contact them! This is the only option! There's no phone number or email!

Has anyone else had this problem? I really hope I'll get a refund but it doesn't seem like it'll happen.